"Blue-Eyed Devil"

Salaam Alaykum

So I really dug this book, Blue-Eyed Devil, and wanted to share some excerpts (some of my favorite bits) with ya'll:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------  "I thought that if a Muslim man practiced his religion with the utmost devotion and sincerity, and just so happened to work at a gas station, any Muslim parents in the world would be proud to give him their daughter's hand. It was pretty stupid of me, I know now as I write it." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "That same night I witnessed the second showing of John Walker: The Musical(...) The whole thing was supposed to be funny but I couldn't laugh when it showed a teen John Walker listening to hip-hop and reading Malcolm's autobiography... or when he told the story of his shahadah and how he changed his name, changed his dress and began studying under a strict Pakistani... or when his coddling Mom told him it was "you and me against the world" and that she'd stand beside him no matter what he did. While the audience giggled during her musical number ("I Support You"), I had tears in my eyes. Then the reporter told John, "Not everyone is like you- they don't go to such depths to read and study and think-" and I almost ran out the the theater.

John was born in 1981, four years younger than me. We both came from Irish-Catholic backgrounds and broken homes. We were both sixteen when we took shahadah, sparked by Malcolm, X and Chuck D. I went to Pakistan in 1994 and was talked out of joining the war for Chechen independence. John went to Yemen in 1998 and Pakistan in 2000. We both made trips to Peshawar. Nobody talked him out of anything. He went to Afghanistan in 2001. The kid was named after John Lennon and Chief Justice John Marshall.

Before belting out his rock-operatic "I'm going to Afghanistan" (with burqa-clad backup dancers), John was introduced as a "21st-Century teenage rebel." Earlier wheeled out by Ed on a gurney, bound and blindfolded in an orange jumpsuit, he was decried as "the worst American in the history of these United States." The show ended with actor Brian Charles Rooney sitting in a cage while the whole cast sand "The Ballad of John Walker:"

"John Walker came from California! John Walker came from California..."

I was in such a daze as we filed out that I made a wrong turn after City Hall Park and ended up going a different route than I had taken before. Soon I found myself in front of World Trade Center station, which was lit up like a baseball park. I went down the steps into the empty concrete plain that people took to subways and PATH trains but everyone was still quiet and respectful of the place- and there were still people having their pictures taken or looking through the fence at dark Ground Zero.

"Can the devil fool a Muslim nowadays?" -Wu Tang Clan, "A Better Tomorrow"

With some video game systems, if there were a lot of character and action on the screen at one time everything would clog up and slow down as the console struggled to process it. My brain did that for me, overloading the interconnectedness of countries and wars and years piled one on top of the other and how it all added up to one-point-eight million tons of concrete steel, L.L. Bean office furniture and human beings tumbling down on itself. For enough people this was the whole of Islam's story, the first thing they ll thing of when you say "Islam in America" and nothing will ever outweigh it. For a second it inexpressible mental clarity I understood. And then I lost it. I felt like I had smoked dope, the way it all came together and then vanished. (...) I slept at Port Authority station on spread out pages of Gaming Today. Every twenty minutes or so a cop would come by and kick my foot. I my half-asleep moments I thought of various high-impact scenes from Spike Lee's Malcolm X: what they mean for me, and what I knew they mean for John. I wondered if he had also closed his eyes during the assassination scene. And we both saw that movie with our moms. The next day I'd go with to see Face to Face play what I think was their last New York show ever. While I sand along to "Disconnected," jumped around in the pit with an Ahmadiyyya girl and took elbows to the head, John Walker sat it FCI Victorville on the margins of the Mojave desert. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------